Art: Transcending Loss & Loss/Lost at Iris Bookcafe

Patrons of a book cafe like to read, right? Seems so at the Iris BookCafé where the photographs-plus-text of Darryl Glenn Baird, University of Michigan professor, are getting close attention. Baird’s digital collages, which combine found and generated images with printed texts, invite close study.

Also on view is the other half of the show called Loss/Lost, featuring the poignant photographs of Pok Chi Lau, a Hong Kong-born photographer (now a professor at the University of Kansas) who documented post-Mao China in the early 1980s.

His series features the interiors of simple, mostly unpopulated dwellings. He says in his artist’s statement, “We are all hungry ghosts, from one stage of life to another.” Perhaps the occupants here are ghosts themselves?